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Is there hope for IPv6?

internetgovernance.org

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Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#281

Post by Aeolun »

phicoh wrote: post #236
nothrabannosir wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> ... the utter failure of v6. > Even if IPv6 was completely perfect... More specifically: "completely technologically perfect". Which is the point being made in this thread: the technical aspect is of only partial relevance. If IPv6 fails because of political problems, or "contextual ones" (like “we could make it technologically inferior but more readily backwards compatible; it would make it less awesome but easie…

It is easy enough to criticize the IETF and the wider IPv6 community for the mistakes they made. But as far as I know, nobody came up with a credible protocol that is fully backward compatible with IPv4. So, you can ask the IETF to come up with a magically protocol that has longer addresses and is still backward compatible with IPv4. But they are only human. So that kind of magic is not going to happen.

Wouldn’t a predefined mask for IPv6 addresses do exactly that? The last 32 bytes of the address could easily be an IPv4 address I should think.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#282

Post by ivlad »

devdas wrote: post #266
pedrocx486 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- If you go around memorising addresses then you are doing IT wrong in general. Because I'll surely have an TLD for my local nginx and for my home router...

.local?

Using .local in DNS is a violation of RFC6762. You really ought not to do this.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#283

Post by icedchai »

Aeolun wrote: post #278
gbrayut wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use home.arpa from https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8375 with a custom DNS server or host file. Or one of the many dynamic DNS systems.

Sure, because a custom DNS server is easy to set up.

It's actually pretty easy. I was able to set one up when I was a teenager, almost 25 years ago, in the early days of the commercial Internet. It is even simpler now.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#285

Post by paulddraper »

Dagger2 wrote: post #170
paulddraper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Heck, there are way too many ISPs allocating a single /64 in v6 land today First, ISPs are allocating them because they can. There are enough total /64 blocks for every living person to have a couple billion blocks . Second, ISPs are allocating /64 blocks because they have to. Well, they don't have to , but there are 20 billion billion total /64 blocks. ISPs will run of capacity in their routing tables long before…

There's no requirement for ISPs to allocate /64 blocks. The requirement is that they allocate enough address space for all of their client's networks to use /64s. As such, all recommendations are for /56 at least (which takes up the exact same amount of space in their routing tables as /64 does: one entry). If v6 was 64 bits in total, then ISPs would need to be allocating something closer to /48s to users at a minimu…

I misunderstood your criticism; I thought the blocks were too small.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#286

Post by tialaramex »

geofft wrote: post #168
Dagger2 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the article is saying. They're saying that you still need to provide access to legacy v4-only hosts on the internet somehow, and you either do that via v4 (i.e. dual stack) or by some transition technology of which NAT64 is just one possible option. Nobody is suggesting to not talk native v6 to the internet too, they're just suggesting to not cut your users off from v4-only services.

If all your connections are potentially NATted (i.e., any DNS lookup might only return an IPv4 record), what's the advantage? You still have to build applications that are capable of dealing with NATs / non-end-to-end connections. You just also have to maintain IPv6 infrastructure. That seems strictly worse than staying on IPv4 NAT. (If you're talking to specific parties that you know have working IPv6, it's less wor…

No. The idea goes like this:

You throw away IPv4 internally. Nothing internally is IPv4. All your network address sizing issues vanish, puff, gone, because in IPv6 the subnets are always 64-bits, which means whether it's four boxes or four million boxes it fits in the same subnet. No more NAT, you just use real (globally unique) IPv6 addresses for everything, so there are no confusing debug sessions where you thought 10.4.5.6 was this box but actually because of how routing is set up it's _that_ box and so you wasted six hours.

So internally everything is _wonderful_

And then to manage the fact that some fraction of the Internet is (and for the foreseeable future will be) IPv4 only, you have edge devices that translate. They translate DNS too. If you ask for www.example.com and the answer is A 10.20.30.40 the edge devices wrap that inside an IPv6 address and provides that as your AAAA answer.

_This_ way around works, because 128 is bigger than 32. Unlike the people who magically want an IPv6 that hides 128-bits in 32-bits, which is mathematically impossible, this merely hides 32-bits in 128-bits, which is trivial.

Anyway, nothing else needs to even care, just those edge devices, and as transition continues you spend less and less money on them. In reality at any modern company you probably already spend more on edge devices you've added because somebody read about them in a magazine - anti-malware, service protection, next generation firewalls, that sort of thing.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#287

Post by ivlad »

vbezhenar wrote: post #223
phicoh wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 3 problems with IPv6 - There is a lot in IPv6 that is different from IPv4. Ignoring if those changes are good or bad, it does make the transition harder. - IPv6 was promoted way before there was demand. To some extent it is good to prepare people (and vendors). But it does create the impression that IPv6 is a failure - Demand for IPv6 is highly asymmetrical. The party that is out of IPv4 addresses needs IPv…

I never truly delved into low level networking, but I generally got a grasp for IPv4, I can setup simple networks and I think that I understand what's going on on every level. Now despite the fact that I tried to understand IPv6 multiple times, I failed miserably all the time. I tried to setup IPv6-over-IPv4 OpenVPN, it did not work despite all efforts. IPv6 is just too complex. At this point I wish that IPv6 would b…

Well, that's pretty childish of you. "I didn't understand it, so I will be bitching how bad it is."

If you think, you understand IPv4 well enough, this book will explain the differences and why certain decisions were made when IPv6 was designed: https://sites.google.com/site/yartikhiy/home/ipv6book

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#288

Post by ivlad »

Someone1234 wrote: post #41
kens wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a lot of technology transitions go smoothly, while others painfully drag on for a decade (ipv6, Python3). Are there any common root causes for the semi-failures? Has anyone written about why some succeed and some don't?

Backwards compatibility seems to be the largest. Look at the deployment of TLS as a success story. Everyone kept on supporting both old and new, watched the percentages, and then dropped the old when the new had enough penetration. The whole thing is also a bit of a shell game. Nobody wants to invest in it until they feel like they're "behind" if they don't. So you have a big player or two in order to make it feel li…

That's not true. TLS didn't happen until Google said they will penalize non-https sites. Letsencrypt helped alot, but the momentum was there even before them.

From the client perspective there is the same level of compatibility between IPv4 and IPv6: client can connect to both types of addresses.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#289

Post by ivlad »

iagovar wrote: post #163
joeseeder wrote: post #21

Yup, now you have to go out of your way to not support it. Literary, every modern ISP, hosting or Cloud provides it. Every Operating System, be it server or client or router, supports IPv6.

No, most ISPs don't. In fact they are afraid of the transition, because of the many glitches, the total lack of support of MANY devices on the consumer side, retraining helpdesk, and so many more. I work for a large ISP and we've done our tests. We ran one about five years ago and it was a total disaster. We're currently doing another one and we smoothed many things. Anyway it's not something welcomed by the helpdesk…

What exaclty are the reasons, why helpdesk agents hate it?

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#290

Post by pseudalopex »

amaccuish wrote: post #228

Can anyone explain to me. So right now for v4, we have NAT, and several ways to get a port open and pointed at us. With v6, every device has its own public address, like how the internet was intended. And as sensible network admins, we should have a default deny incoming firewall policy for v6 traffic. But surely that will prevent these "end-to-end" apps from working, and now they don't even have protocols like UPnP…

Sensible network admins will open ports for specific services. Also, UPnP, NAT-PMP, and PCP support IPv6.
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